In industrial settings, the process of developing new products and services may often involve a number of cycles that include divergent or generative ideation phases, followed by narrowing or selection phases in which the ideas are assessed and tested, and decisions made further to develop or market an idea. One example of a divergent or generative activity is the well-known brainstorming or ideation session. Examples of narrowing activities include concept testing, concept optimization, conjoint measurement and forecasting models.
Several activities carried out during the product development process can be used to support either phase, depending on how they are structured. For example, focus groups and 1-on-1 interviews with consumers can be used during the ideation phase, as open-ended processes for generating new ideas. They can also be used to assess and test the viability of an already formulated concept for a new product or service.
Typically, general-purpose office software applications are used to capture and organize the different ideas and their elements, and the many variants for each of these elements. Spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft® Excel® and Apple® Numbers® are commonly used for that purpose, and word processing applications, such as Microsoft® Word and Apple® Pages® are also used. Presentation software applications such as Microsoft® PowerPoint® and Apple® Keynote are also commonly used to develop visual representations of the proposed product concepts. (Microsoft, Excel, and PowerPoint are all trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both; Apple, Notes, Pages, and Keynote are all trademarks of Apple Inc. in the United States, other countries, or both.)
The use of such common office productivity applications, which are not optimized for the task of developing and exploring concepts with varying elements, presents a number of difficulties and challenges that result in poor productivity. For example, the use of disparate applications, one for capturing the idea elements and their variants and another for visually representing the idea, itself presents a set of challenges when it comes to communicating and sharing this information with the other stakeholders involved in the product development process. Two different documents may need to be shared or emailed back and forth between individuals participating in the concept development process. Furthermore, it may be desired that the contents of the documents be kept up-to-date and synchronized throughout the various collaborative editing and commenting sessions.
The use of a presentation application to generate visual representations of the new idea or concept often leads to a number of difficulties as well. For example, for every concept variation that is desired to be represented, a copy of the original representation slide must be created, and the elements that are different edited (typically by copying and pasting from element variants in the spreadsheet document). If some other element is changed, multiple slides may have to be updated. Because of the repetitive nature of this process, it may often only be practical to generate a tiny fraction of the possible alternatives enabled by the element variants.
Typically, the outcome of the generative phases in the product development process is a set of ideas and variations thereof. It may often be desirable that a product idea be described and represented in a way sufficient to differentiate it from other ideas and, if it fits into an existing product category, to differentiate it from in-market incumbents (in particular, competitors' products). The description must also be appropriate for use in the next phase of the development process, be it presenting the idea to senior management for approval, or using the description and representation to conduct consumer research in order to assess the viability of the idea. Accordingly, it may often be necessary to generate various different versions of a representation, to allow possible points of differentiation to be explored.